Quotes

‘To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal’. Psycholoog William James (1842-1910)

‘There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.’ William James

‘A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.’ William James

‘The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.’ William James

‘Things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.’ Albert Einstein

“What you think matters, in fact it forms matter” Vajra Ghanta Gadan

“When he speaks of “reality” the layman usually means something obvious and well-known, whereas it seems to me that precisely the most important and extremely difficult task of our time is to work on elaborating a new idea of reality. This is also what I mean when I always emphasize that science and religion must be related in some way.” Wolfgang Pauli, letter to M. Fierz, August 12, 1948.

“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black…it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.” Psycholoog William James (1842-1910)

“The progress of science is inhibited by imbuing young minds with an incorrect idea of the nature of reality, and the pernicious philosophical idea that man is made of classically conceived matter is not exposed as being incompatible with the empirical facts”. Henri Stapp. Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics. Springer Verlag 2004, p. 271.

“Although the content of consciousness depends in large measure on neuronal activity, awareness itself does not….To me, it seems more and more reasonable to suggest that the mind may be a distinct and different essence”. Wilder Penfield (Nobelprijswinnaar) 1975

“The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.” Sir William Lawrence Bragg

“It’s been said that there’s nothing so troublesome as a new idea and I think that’s particularly true in science.” Ian Stevenson

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grow up that is familiar with it.” Max Planck (1948) Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, trans. F. Gaynor (New York, 1949), pp.33-34

“I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition. . . . we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world”. J.C. Eccles; Evolution of the Brain, Creation of the Self, p. 241

“The universe is vast. Nothing more curious than the self-satisfied dogmatism at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of its existing modes of knowledge. Sceptics and believers are all alike. At this moment scientists and sceptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted: fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophical adventure. The universe is vast”. A.N. Whitehead (1948): Essays in Science and Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library: pp.129

“Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority; and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole laboriously constructed intellectual edifice may collapse” A.Koestler (1959) The sleepwalkers, Hutchinson, London.

“It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible. When this happens, the most well-informed men become blind by their prejudices and unable to see what lies directly ahead of them” Athur C. Clarke (1963)

“What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?” S.T. Coleridge

“The progress of science is inhibited by imbuing young minds with an incorrect idea of the nature of reality, and the pernicious philosophical idea that man is made of classically conceived matter is not exposed as being incompatible with the empirical facts”. Henri Stapp. Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics. Springer Verlag 2004, p. 271

“If consciousness be a mere epiphenomenon… accompanying, but in no way guiding, certain molecular changes in the brain, we shall of course expect… that consciousness is exclusively linked with the functional disintegration of central nervous elements, and varies in its intensity with the rapidity or energy of that disintegration. And ordinary experience, at least within physiological limits, will support some view like this. Yet now and then we find a case where vivid consciousness has existed during a state of apparent coma… tranquilly and intelligently co-existing with an almost complete abeyance of ordinary vital function…. Until this new field has been more fully worked — until the traces of memory which may survive from comatose, ecstatic, syncopal conditions have been revived (by hypnotic suggestion or otherwise), and carefully compared, we have no right to make any absolute assertion as to the concomitant cerebral processes on which consciousness depends.” (Myers, 1891d, 116-117)

“Although the content of consciousness depends in large measure on neuronal activity, awareness itself does not….To me, it seems more and more reasonable to suggest that the mind may be a distinct and different essence.” Wilder Penfield, 1975

“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” Niels Bohr.

“Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature, but rather recognizes itself as part of the interplay between man and nature. The scientific method…changes and transforms its object: the procedure can no longer keep its distance from the object”. Nobel laureate and quantum physicists Werner Heisenberg, (1901-1976)

“The task is…not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.” Erwin Schrödinger

“The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.” Sir James Jeans

“Physicists who are trying to understand Nature may work in many different fields and by many different methods; one may dig, one may sow, one may reap. But the final harvest will always be a sheaf of mathematical formulae. These will never describe Nature itself . . . [Thus] our studies can never put us into contact with reality.” Sir James Jeans

“Consciousness is more than perceiving and knowing; it is knowing that you know” Jeffrey Schwartz, in : The mind and the brain

“What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.” T.H. Key

“So far we can locate no single region in which the neural activity corresponds exactly to the vivid picture of the world we see in front of our eyes” Crick, F. The astonishing Hypothesis. New York, Scribner (1994): 159

“The mind in its own place, and in itself, can make a heaven of hell.” John Milton: Paradise lost

“If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run- and often in the short one- the most daring prophecies seem laughable conservative.” Arthur C. Clarke

“The connection between consciousness and the brain is primary a problem in physics and addressable by physics- but only the correct physics” Henri Stapp